[Tagging] Add some tag to identify disputed borders

Paul Allen pla16021 at gmail.com
Tue Nov 13 11:44:21 UTC 2018


On Tue, Nov 13, 2018 at 7:07 AM Graeme Fitzpatrick <graemefitz1 at gmail.com>
wrote:

How about marking the disputed area (dashed lines) as a new level, say
> boundary=administrative + admin_level=15?
>

Please, not this.  From the first two sentences of the first paragraph of
the wiki:

The admin_level key describes the administrative level of an object within
a government hierarchy. A lower level means higher in the hierarchy.

Your suggestion breaks this, which is reason enough not to do it.  It means
special-casing in
editors and renderers, which complicates the code a little.  It also means
special-casing in
humans, who are notoriously bad at getting things wrong.

In programming, this sort of trick is considered a very bad thing.  In the
past it was quite common,
but these days programmers try to avoid putting special-case values into an
otherwise hierarchical
or quantitative field (some programmers might accept negative numbers as
having special meaning,
but many would not).

It would also require more effort to reverse if a dispute is resolved.
Having something like
admin_level=2 + disputed=yes can be reversed easily, but admin_level=15
requires extra
effort (not much, but some) in order to figure out what the admin_level
should change to.
Even admin_level=-2 meaning that when resolved it changes to admin_level=2
would be
better than this.

To complicate matters further, has anyone considered what to do with
condominia like
Pheasant Island <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pheasant_Island>?  It's not
disputed, but it belongs to France for 6 months of the year and to
Spain for the other six months of the year.  There are other condominia
where sovereignty
is joint but continuous rather than time-shared.

-- 
Paul
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